Key Agreement from Close Secrets over Unsecured Channels

We consider information-theoretic key agreement between two parties sharing somewhat different versions of a secret w that has relatively little entropy. Such key agreement, also known as information reconciliation and privacy amplification over unsecured channels, was shown to be theoretically feasible by Renner and Wolf (Eurocrypt 2004), although no protocol that runs in polynomial time was described. We propose a protocol that is not only polynomial-time, but actually practical, requiring only a few seconds on consumer-grade computers. Our protocol can be seen as an interactive version of robust fuzzy extractors (Boyen et al., Eurocrypt 2005, Dodis et al., Crypto 2006). While robust fuzzy extractors, due to their noninteractive nature, require w to have entropy at least half its length, we have no such constraint. In fact, unlike in prior solutions, in our solution the entropy loss is essentially unrelated to the length or the entropy of w, and depends only on the security parameter

Locally Reconstructable Non-Malleable Secret Sharing

Non-malleable secret sharing (NMSS) schemes, introduced by Goyal and Kumar (STOC 2018), ensure that a secret $m$ can be distributed into shares $m_1,...,m_n$ (for some $n$), such that any $t$ (a parameter $<=n$) shares can be reconstructed to recover the secret $m$, any $t-1$ shares doesn\u27t leak information about $m$ and even if the shares that are used for reconstruction are tampered, it is guaranteed that the reconstruction of these tampered shares will either result in the original $m$ or something independent of $m$. Since their introduction, non-malleable secret sharing schemes sparked a very impressive line of research. In this work, we introduce a feature of local reconstructability in NMSS, which allows reconstruction of any portion of a secret by reading just a few locations of the shares. This is a useful feature, especially when the secret is long or when the shares are stored in a distributed manner on a communication network. In this work, we give a compiler that takes in any non-malleable secret sharing scheme and compiles it into a locally reconstructable non-malleable secret sharing scheme. To secret share a message consisting of $k$ blocks of length $l$ each, our scheme would only require reading $l + log k$ bits (in addition to a few more bits, whose quantity is independent of $l$ and $k$) from each party\u27s share (of a reconstruction set) to locally reconstruct a single block of the message. We show an application of our locally reconstructable non-malleable secret sharing scheme to a computational non-malleable secure message transmission scheme in the pre-processing model, with an improved communication complexity, when transmitting multiple messages

Short Leakage Resilient and Non-malleable Secret Sharing Schemes

Leakage resilient secret sharing (LRSS) allows a dealer to share a secret amongst $n$ parties such that any authorized subset of the parties can recover the secret from their shares, while an adversary that obtains shares of any unauthorized subset of parties along with bounded leakage from the other shares learns no information about the secret. Non-malleable secret sharing (NMSS) provides a guarantee that even shares that are tampered by an adversary will reconstruct to either the original message or something independent of it. The most important parameter of LRSS and NMSS schemes is the size of each share. For LRSS, in the local leakage model (i.e., when the leakage functions on each share are independent of each other and bounded), Srinivasan and Vasudevan (CRYPTO 2019), gave a scheme for threshold access structures with a share size of approximately ($3$.(message length) + $\mu$), where $\mu$ is the number of bits of leakage tolerated from every share. For the case of NMSS, the best known result (again due to the above work) has a share size of ($11$.(message length)). In this work, we build LRSS and NMSS schemes with much improved share sizes. Additionally, our LRSS scheme obtains optimal share and leakage size. In particular, we get the following results: -We build an information-theoretic LRSS scheme for threshold access structures with a share size of ((message length) + $\mu$). -As an application of the above result, we obtain an NMSS with a share size of ($4$.(message length)). Further, for the special case of sharing random messages, we obtain a share size of ($2$.(message length))

Secure Auctions in the Presence of Rational Adversaries

Sealed bid auctions are used to allocate a resource among a set of interested parties. Traditionally, auctions need the presence of a trusted auctioneer to whom the bidders provide their private bid values. Existence of such a trusted party is not an assumption easily realized in practice. Generic secure computation protocols can be used to remove a trusted party. However, generic techniques result in inefficient protocols, and typically do not provide fairness - that is, a corrupt party can learn the output and abort the protocol thereby preventing other parties from learning the output. At CRYPTO 2009, Miltersen, Nielsen and Triandopoulos [MNT09], introduced the problem of building auctions that are secure against rational bidders. Such parties are modeled as self-interested agents who care more about maximizing their utility than about learning information about bids of other agents. To realize this, they put forth a novel notion of information utility and introduce a game-theoretic framework that helps analyse protocols while taking into account both information utility as well as monetary utility. Unfortunately, their construction makes use a of generic MPC protocol and, consequently, the authors do not analyze the concrete efficiency of their protocol. In this work, we construct the first concretely efficient and provably secure protocol for First Price Auctions in the rational setting. Our protocol guarantees privacy and fairness. Inspired by [MNT09], we put forth a solution concept that we call Privacy Enhanced Computational Weakly Dominant Strategy Equilibrium that captures parties\u27 privacy and monetary concerns in the game theoretic context, and show that our protocol realizes this. We believe this notion to be of independent interest. Our protocol is crafted specifically for the use case of auctions, is simple, using off-the-shelf cryptographic components. Executing our auction protocol on commodity hardware with 10 bidders, with bids of length 10, our protocol runs to completion in 0.141s and has total communication of 30KB

Information-theoretic Local Non-malleable Codes and their Applications

Error correcting codes, though powerful, are only applicable in scenarios where the adversarial channel does not introduce ``too many errors into the codewords. Yet, the question of having guarantees even in the face of many errors is well-motivated. Non-malleable codes, introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs (ICS 2010), address precisely this question. Such codes guarantee that even if an adversary completely over-writes the codeword, he cannot transform it into a codeword for a related message. Not only is this a creative solution to the problem mentioned above, it is also a very meaningful one. Indeed, non-malleable codes have inspired a rich body of theoretical constructions as well as applications to tamper-resilient cryptography, CCA2 encryption schemes and so on. Another remarkable variant of error correcting codes were introduced by Katz and Trevisan (STOC 2000) when they explored the question of decoding ``locally . Locally decodable codes are coding schemes which have an additional ``local decode procedure: in order to decode a bit of the message, this procedure accesses only a few bits of the codeword. These codes too have received tremendous attention from researchers and have applications to various primitives in cryptography such as private information retrieval. More recently, Chandran, Kanukurthi and Ostrovsky (TCC 2014) explored the converse problem of making the ``re-encoding process local. Locally updatable codes have an additional ``local update procedure: in order to update a bit of the message, this procedure accesses/rewrites only a few bits of the codeword. At TCC 2015, Dachman-Soled, Liu, Shi and Zhou initiated the study of locally decodable and updatable non-malleable codes, thereby combining all the important properties mentioned above into one tool. Achieving locality and non-malleability is non-trivial. Yet, Dachman-Soled \etal \ provide a meaningful definition of local non-malleability and provide a construction that satisfies it. Unfortunately, their construction is secure only in the computational setting. In this work, we construct information-theoretic non-malleable codes which are locally updatable and decodable. Our codes are non-malleable against \s{F}_{\textsf{half}}, the class of tampering functions where each function is arbitrary but acts (independently) on two separate parts of the codeword. This is one of the strongest adversarial models for which explicit constructions of standard non-malleable codes (without locality) are known. Our codes have \bigo(1) rate and locality \bigo(\lambda), where $\lambda$ is the security parameter. We also show a rate $1$ code with locality $\omega(1)$ that is non-malleable against bit-wise tampering functions. Finally, similar to Dachman-Soled \etal, our work finds applications to information-theoretic secure RAM computation

Privacy Amplification with Asymptotically Optimal Entropy Loss

We study the problem of ``privacy amplification\u27\u27: key agreement between two parties who both know a weak secret w, such as a password. (Such a setting is ubiquitous on the internet, where passwords are the most commonly used security device.) We assume that the key agreement protocol is taking place in the presence of an active computationally unbounded adversary Eve. The adversary may have partial knowledge about w, so we assume only that w has some entropy from Eve\u27s point of view. Thus, the goal of the protocol is to convert this non-uniform secret w into a uniformly distributed string $R$ that is fully secret from Eve. R may then be used as a key for running symmetric cryptographic protocols (such as encryption, authentication, etc.). Because we make no computational assumptions, the entropy in R can come only from w. Thus such a protocol must minimize the entropy loss during its execution, so that R is as long as possible. The best previous results have entropy loss of $\Theta(\kappa^2)$, where $\kappa$ is the security parameter, thus requiring the password to be very long even for small values of $\kappa$. In this work, we present the first protocol for information-theoretic key agreement that has entropy loss LINEAR in the security parameter. The result is optimal up to constant factors. We achieve our improvement through a somewhat surprising application of error-correcting codes for the edit distance. The protocol can be extended to provide also ``information reconciliation,\u27\u27 that is, to work even when the two parties have slightly different versions of w (for example, when biometrics are involved)

Rate One-Third Non-malleable Codes

At ITCS 2010, Dziembowski, Pietrzak, and Wichs introduced Non-malleable Codes (NMCs) which protect against tampering of a codeword of a given message into the codeword of a related message. A well-studied model of tampering is the $2$-split-state model where the codeword consists of two independently tamperable states. As with standard error-correcting codes, it is of great importance to build codes with high rates. Following a long line of work, Aggarwal and Obremski (FOCS 2020) showed the first constant rate non-malleable code in the $2-$split state model; however this constant was a minuscule $10^{-6}$! In this work, we build a Non-malleable Code with rate $1/3$. This nearly matches the rate $1/2$ lower bound for this model due to Cheraghchi and Guruswami (ITCS 2014). Our construction is simple, requiring just an inner-product extractor, a seeded extractor, and an affine-evasive function

Robust Fuzzy Extractors and Authenticated Key Agreement from Close Secrets

Abstract: Consider two parties holding samples from correlated distributions W and W\u27, respectively, where these samples are within distance t of each other in some metric space. The parties wish to agree on a close-to-uniformly distributed secret key R by sending a single message over an insecure channel controlled by an all-powerful adversary who may read and modify anything sent over the channel. We consider both the keyless case, where the parties share no additional secret information, and the keyed case, where the parties share a long-term secret SK_Ext that they can use to generate a sequence of session keys {R_j} using multiple pairs {(W_j,W\u27_j)}. The former has applications to, e.g., biometric authentication, while the latter arises in, e.g., the bounded-storage model with errors. We show solutions that improve upon previous work in several respects: -- The best prior solution for the keyless case with no errors (i.e., t=0) requires the min-entropy of W to exceed 2n/3, where n is the bit-length of W. Our solution applies whenever the min-entropy of W exceeds the minimal threshold n/2, and yields a longer key. -- Previous solutions for the keyless case in the presence of errors (i.e., t>0) required random oracles. We give the first constructions (for certain metrics) in the standard model. -- Previous solutions for the keyed case were stateful. We give the first stateless solution

AN IMPROVED ROBUST FUZZY EXTRACTOR

BHAVANA KANUKURTH